ANTARCTICA The ice caps are melting, the result of global warming, and scientists have begun to realize just
how catastrophic this is. Only recently have we come to understand the importance of these ice caps,
which act as giant reflectors, bouncing the sun's heating rays back into space and helping keep the
Earth cool. As they melt, revealing less-reflective ocean water and land, the earth absorbs more
sunlight and grows hotter, hastening even more melting.
But beyond their importance to the globe, these huge ice fields are also astonishingly beautiful and incomprehensibly vast - a natural wonder on a biblical scale…home to grand, glacier-covered
mountains, iceberg-laden bays and - during the brief Antarctic summer - teeming wildlife that
includes penguins, seals and whales… Perhaps no other place in the world can claim such a crucial
role in the future of the planet and, indeed, the existence of man.
- USA Today
Partner:
Antarctic Peninsula Long-Term Ecological Research Project
Initiative:
to purchase essential scientific equipment monitoring
equipment
The Major Source of Cooling for the World's Oceans
Though it borders the world's major oceans, the Southern Ocean system is like no
other in the world, with 4 times more water than the Gulf Stream and 400 times
more than the Mississippi River. It is a sea where average temperatures do not reach
2 degrees in the Summer, where even the water itself is so distinctive that it can be
identified thousands of miles away in currents that originated here.
Antarctic Bottom Waters provide the major source of cooling for the world's oceans.
In fact, if the Earth is a heat engine, Antarctic should be viewed as its circulatory
cooling component.
Scientists in the Antarctic have been monitoring the impact of climate change since
1991 through the installation of automatic meteorological stations, annual research
cruises in the austral summer and research at Palmer Station. Funding will purchase
essential scientific equipment to monitor air temperature and pressure, wind speed
and direction, humidity and sea temperature.
The Climate in Antarctica is also unique, linked as it is to the extreme conditions
of the Land, ice, and sea below the troposphere (the inner region of the atmosphere,
up to between 11 and 16 kilometers). This ocean/atmosphere environment defines
and constrains the marine biosphere and in turn has a dynamic relationship with the
global Ocean and with weather all over the planet. Few major energy exchanges on
Earth can be calculated without factoring in these essential Antarctic phenomena.
As such, they are both an indicator and a component of climate change.
